Sara Herschander | Vox

The tax code rewards generosity. But probably not yours.

2026-04-14T18:34:10-04:00

Americans of all income levels give back, but it’s the richest who reap almost all of the benefits of the charitable tax deduction. | J. David Ake/Getty Images

Ah, Tax Day.

If you’ve been staring at your tax bill and wondering how to keep more of your money, money, money to yourself next year, you might consider taking a page out of the billionaire’s playbook. You could be like Steve Ballmer and write off the costs of buying a sports team, or make like Mark Zuckerberg and dial down your salary to just $1 per year.

Or, if those things seem daunting, you might just donate to charity instead.

Every year, the US Treasury loses upward of $65 billion in revenue — enough money to pay for a national universal pre-K program by one count — to charitable deductions. But while Americans of all income levels give back, it’s the richest Americans who have reaped almost all of the benefits on their tax bill.

Over nine in 10 Americans won’t claim the charitable tax break this year because it only makes financial sense for people who have enough expenses to “itemize” their taxes, rather than take a standardized deduction — though that may be changing next tax cycle.

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Meanwhile, over 80 percent of the country’s wealthiest earners — the millionaires and multimillionaires who almost always itemize — get money back for every dollar they give to charity.

Rewarding such giving means more money for charity — one model estimates that giving would fall by as much as $50 billion a year if the deduction were eliminated. But the policy also means less revenue for the government.

Michael Bloomberg, for example, gave about $4.3 billion to charity last year, mostly through his own foundation. That would in theory translate into a $1.6 billion tax break, assuming he’s taxed at the top income rate of 37 percent. So by this count, the donations really only cost him $2.7 billion. Even for those who aren’t quite as wealthy, tax-deductible donations are sort of like buying a $20 gift card that you only need to pay $13 for, earmarked for a charity of your choice.

That is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you ask. Many wealthy people use their philanthropy to underwrite causes that go underfunded by governments, such as malaria prevention, racial justice, and the clean energy transition.

“I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing US debt,” Warren Buffett told ProPublica, which found that the 95-year-old billionaire paid just 10 cents in taxes for every $100 he added to his wealth between 2014 and 2018.

But critics point out that many wealthy people don’t donate like normal people do. Instead of writing checks directly to working charities, over 41 cents of every dollar donated in the US gets stashed in private foundations or donor-advised funds, which are charitable accounts. While donors get an immediate tax break for giving to these intermediaries, such charitable vehicles often take their sweet time doling out donations to actual charities, while the cash accumulates in their accounts, sometimes for years. Eventually, much of it may go to their own affiliated charitable projects or educational or cultural institutions that often cater to the wealthy, such as art galleries and Ivy League schools.

“I don’t think we should assume that what’s done with philanthropy is better than what’s done with tax dollars,” Ray D. Madoff, a tax lawyer and author of The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, wrote in The Conversation in January. “The money is often landing in what’s essentially a halfway house, with no obligation to get out.”

What this means for your tax bill

The fact that most Americans don’t see their charity reflected on their tax bill affects how they give.

While the charitable deduction has always been implicitly aimed at the elite, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made it even less accessible for low- and middle-income families. The law nearly doubled the standard deduction to $12,000, which meant far fewer Americans had enough expenses to justify itemizing their deductions. That caused the number of households claiming the benefit to plunge from 37 million in 2017 to just 16 million in 2018.

While the very wealthiest households continued to benefit, the share of middle-income families claiming the benefit fell by two-thirds, from 17 percent to just over 5 percent. Even among high-income households making between $216,800 and $307,900 per year, only 40 percent took the deduction in 2018, down from 78 percent the year prior.

In tandem, the number of everyday Americans giving to charity continued to drop precipitously. Researchers at Indiana University estimate that the 2017 bill led to a $20 billion decline in charitable giving, with families that no longer benefit from deduction reducing their donations by an average of $880 each year.

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, however, did indeed do one big, beautiful thing for the charitable tax deduction. This time next year, Americans who don’t itemize their taxes — again, nine in 10 of us — will be able to lop off $1,000 in charitable contributions from their taxable income, or $2,000 for joint filers.

The Generosity Commission, which aims to encourage more Americans to give, has been advocating for such a change for years. And while it is not enough to radically reshape who primarily benefits from the tax break, researchers believe that it could lead 8 million more households to give to charity in the long run, leading to about $4.39 billion in new annual donations that they wouldn’t have made otherwise.

Someone who earns $65,000 and gives $350 to their church or local school each year will now pay $77 less in taxes if they remember to document their gifts. Their $350 donation will effectively only cost them $273.

Most Americans, including a full 70 percent of Zoomers and 57 percent of millennials, say they would give more to charity if they could write it off on their taxes. It will probably take time for them to catch wind of the fact that now, they finally can.

There’s a trade-off, though: The bill also made the tax break a little less lucrative for corporations and top earners. Researchers estimate that despite the multibillion-dollar increase in new donors, the changes will lead to a $5.67 billion reduction in charity overall each year — equivalent to a 1 percent drop in US giving — because wealthy donors may be less inclined to donate as much as they used to, which would mean the change would be a net negative for charity. And since the top 1 percent of households play an outsized role in philanthropy — accounting for one-third of all charitable giving — their retreat could have profound consequences for the causes and nonprofits they support.

But most Americans who give to charity aren’t in it for the tax break. They donate because they are trying to make a difference — sometimes for a cause they care about, sometimes simply in the life of a friend or neighbor. Almost three-quarters of them have given to an organization like a food bank or animal shelter in the past year, according to a poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, and even more have donated to crowdfunding campaigns or given goods like canned food.

Those ordinary donors typically aren’t rushing to pile up end-of-year donation receipts that they can write off on their tax forms. Most gave less than $500 each year, probably because while they’d like to give more, they often feel they can’t afford it. (Though as my colleague Sigal Samuel has written, nearly all of us can find ways to give if we try hard enough.)

Still, a boost from the charitable tax break could help. And if regular donors start giving more now, then by this time next year, they may finally get the break that they deserve, too.

Did Trump accidentally do something woke for global health?

2026-04-07T14:54:52-04:00

The Trump administration has negotiated dozens of bilateral health deals with African governments, which will receive billions of dollars that they can spend as they see fit. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

A surprising quirk of the Trump administration is that every so often, it tries so hard to be anti-woke that it accidentally does something woke.

See, for example, the efforts of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who oversaw USAID’s demise — directives that have contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — and who stood at the White House beside the president of Kenya a few months ago, railing against what he called the “NGO industrial complex.”

Now, I don’t know who taught Rubio that progressive catchphrase, but I doubt that he got it from INCITE!, the radical feminist collective that popularized a variation of the term in an anthology that examined the role of nonprofits in undermining social progress. In the two decades that followed, the idea of a nonprofit or — as they’re often known in international contexts — NGO “industrial complex” grew into a snarky self-critique for much of that sector’s left-leaning young workforce. By the time Teen Vogue used the term in 2022, the phrase also hinted at an enduring related criticism of USAID’s tendency to primarily fund Western nonprofits rather than local governments and organizations in recipient countries.

Key takeaways

USAID’s critics have long called for the agency to fund more local governments and groups, instead of relying on the “NGO industrial complex” to do its bidding.
The Trump administration has embraced this critique, negotiating dozens of global health deals that put aid in the hands of local governments, not foreign NGOs.
Ideally, this means more funding for local health systems, and foreign aid that’s more cost-effective and better attuned to local needs.
But this is global health MAGA-style after all, and skeptics fear the terms of the deals may be exploitative — and are already leading to deadly lapses in services.

In an unexpected twist, this term has found its way into the vocabulary of a very Republican secretary of state, now reflecting a preference for funding foreign governments over non-governmental organizations (NGOs). “If we’re trying to help countries, help the country,” Rubio said in his remarks in December announcing a new $1.6 billion bilateral aid deal between the US State Department and Kenya. “Don’t help the NGO to go in and find a new line of business.”

Whatever one thinks of Rubio, he has a point. As part of the “America First Global Health Strategy” announced last year, the Trump administration has embraced an approach to foreign aid that more left-leaning reformists have been talking about for years, a concept known as localization, or the idea that giving aid directly to local governments and organizations — not Western nonprofits — is the best and most cost-effective way to strengthen global aid overall and global health systems especially. In recent months, the US has negotiated dozens of deals between the State Department and African governments, which are set to collectively receive billions of dollars that they can spend as they see fit.

The logic might seem sound. But it hasn’t happened sooner because it’s also risky. It’s harder to audit a foreign government than a well-established, well-connected NGO. And millions of lives are on the line. The transition from the one approach to the other is also fraught: Dismantling USAID has disrupted access to vital medications and health services around the world, leading to mass suffering and loss of life. It is unclear if this new strategy will be able to fill those lapses in care, especially for the women and children most vulnerable to aid cuts.

But if there were ever a moment to blow up the entire old aid order, it’s arguably now, when there is very little left to lose. And it turns out some surprising figures in global health are cautiously optimistic about it.

“They’re basically making a bet that they can do it and get away with it, and if things go wrong, they’ll get a bit of a pass,” Rachel Bonnifield, director of the global health policy program at the Center for Global Development, said of the administration. “And that’s probably true, and it very well might be a good thing” for global health in the long run.

It comes at a critical juncture for global health and American foreign aid more broadly. “We all have to work hard to ensure that these disruptive moments are moments of real progress,” said Jirair Ratevosian, a senior adviser for health equity policy under the Biden administration and now a senior scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. If all goes well, the strategy could “be a huge success for this administration,” he said, “something that I think, decades from now, public health will credit this administration for.”

It’s worth noting, however, that this MAGA-fied global health strategy has also doubled as just another way for this administration to get other countries to do what they want. For example, watchdog groups have raised serious concerns about the terms of the new deals, which require African countries to share sensitive health data and even precious minerals with the United States just to keep their clinics open. Many people won’t get their HIV meds at all this year simply because Trump takes issue with the governments they live under. And the administration’s rushed timeline — which included shutting off existing aid flows overnight, instead of transitioning over time — has led to deadly lapses in services in the countries that can least afford it.

What’s clear is that this administration has enacted the most sweeping reform to global health in a generation. But so far, they’ve opted to do so in the worst way possible. The question for those that inherit this new structure is whether something good can come from it: Will this change herald a new norm of more effective giving that advocates have dreamed about for decades — or will global aid fully transform into another cudgel that this White House and the next ones brandish to pressure poorer nations into doing their bidding?

The USAID system was imperfect — even if its work was crucial

Margaret Odera is a community health worker in Kenya. In 2006, she was diagnosed with HIV and nearly died of the virus before a local health worker, funded by USAID, convinced her to seek free anti-retroviral therapies through PEPFAR.

“My life was saved through USAID,” Odera, who also credits the agency with helping her find her own calling as a health worker, told me. Despite that, she often felt that there was something amiss about how it distributed its resources.

“Most of the money, maybe 70 percent of it, was going directly into people’s pockets,” she said with a sigh, instead of “coming to the ground for community members.” She’s referring here to the notion that foreign (often North American or European) nonprofits gobbled up most of USAID’s budget, while local health workers on the ground like herself received minimal support.

It is true that almost all of the big USAID contracts went to a small group of large organizations, many of them American NGOs. As of 2024, just over 10 percent of USAID grants and contracts went to local groups in recipient countries, a statistic that Elon Musk later called out to smear the agency as fundamentally wasteful.

Despite the Trump administration’s admonitions, there is no evidence of widespread waste, fraud, or abuse at organizations funded by USAID. In fact, their work saved millions of lives each year.

Still, the US might have been able to save even more lives if local groups and governments played a more central role in distributing aid. The research group the Share Trust found that channeling funding through local groups is 32 percent more cost-effective than funding higher-salaried Western NGOs.

“I don’t think it’s as inefficient as they say it is, but it’s undeniable that there is overhead incurred in the United States,” Bonnifield said. Between the higher prices of foreign salaries and the expense of transporting workers to and from the countries in which they’re working, the costs simply “add up and get expensive.”

And that means less money for Odera and other local health workers, who in Kenya, are paid a meager government stipend worth about $35 per month — less than the country’s minimum wage. There are roughly 3 million community health workers globally — who often serve as a critical, and sometimes only, line of medical contact, especially for people in poorer countries. And the vast majority of these workers do not receive any salary at all.

Before Trump, USAID-funded NGOs did employ and pay a massive number of local health workers. But this model also led to a kind of parallel health care system, Bonnifield said, where NGOs — with their big budgets and better salaries — would inadvertently “poach from the public sector.”

The result was a bifurcated health sector. While USAID was very effective at combatting specific diseases like HIV or malaria, these programs were effectively siloed from countries’ broader primary health care systems, which often went underfunded. Many people knew where to get their HIV meds, but struggled to find a primary care doctor.

“People want to go to a health care center, and they want to get all of their support in one stop,” Ratevosian said. “They want to get tested for HIV, they want to pick up their malaria medications, they want to get checked for high blood pressure, just like anyone else wants to in any other country in the world.”

The art of the global health deal

But even though USAID was never perfect, its wholesale destruction instantly put millions of people’s lives at risk, thrusting local health workers into a panic around the world.

Odera remembers the chaotic day the agency laid off its health staff — including a clinic providing HIV care and anti-retroviral therapies — in Mathare, one of Kenya’s largest slums.

“I feared for my life,” said Odera, who still relied on USAID to keep her own HIV in check. “I was asking myself, ‘What will happen five years from now, if I’m not taking drugs? I still have small kids, who I’m educating, and if I die now, what will happen to my children?’”

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world did die in the immediate aftermath, from hunger or preventable diseases, unable to access previously USAID-funded resources.

In the following months, however, elements of USAID’s work experienced a groggy rebirth, culminating in September with the release of a new “America First” global health plan, parts of which read oddly familiar to progressive reformists who favor localization.

Suddenly, it seemed, the Trump administration was ready to make a deal: As part of an untested new strategy, the US would enter into “multiyear bilateral agreements” directly with recipient countries, offering up to billions of dollars of support in exchange for the promise to progressively increase their own domestic health spending to varying degrees. Kenya’s was the first to be negotiated in December, followed by Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and others soon after. As of March, the US had negotiated bilateral deals with 27 countries across Africa and Central America.

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At first glance, “of course we were excited,” said Peter Waiswa, a Ugandan health systems researcher and associate professor at the Makerere University School of Public Health. Not only was US global health aid on the rise but for the first time, local authorities would take center stage.

“From a systems perspective, there’s no alternative to government in terms of doing a public good,” Waiswa said. “And so that was exciting that maybe at last, the [Ugandan] government will have a little bit more to be able to deliver.”

But this is the Trump White House’s global health strategy after all, and the State Department has made no secret of advancing its own interests in shaping bilateral deals.

For one thing, the White House expects recipient countries to share health data and biological specimens with the US government. This is ostensibly put forth as a means of quickly identifying and quashing disease outbreaks as they arise, which might sound like a benign addendum — it is generally good when countries share health data with one another. But advocates have raised alarms over whether the data-sharing terms will abide by local privacy laws, and, moreover, whether African nations will actually benefit from any health innovations gleaned from the data, such as when African countries struggled to access Ebola treatments developed from their own citizens’ health data.

Allan Maleche, executive director of the Kenya Legal & Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS, said that the biggest concern is about who controls that data, and eventually profits off of it: “What are the consent and limitations safeguards when you share data across borders?”

In December, dozens of organizations signed a letter addressed to African heads of state raising objections to the data sharing requirement. Kenya’s health deal with the US is currently on hold until a data privacy lawsuit proceeds through that country’s court system. And Zimbabwe ended talks with the US about health aid in February over similar concerns.

Another emerging risk is that the agreements could come with increasingly strict geopolitical strings attached. In Zambia, the US State Department has refused to sign over lifesaving aid unless the country agrees to fork over its vast mineral reserves to American businesses.

“It is effectively not really a health strategy, but a security and economic strategy,” Mihir Mankad, director of advocacy and global health policy at Doctors Without Borders, told me. Other countries on the president’s bad side, such as South Africa, have been excluded from the negotiations altogether, severely disrupting their responses to public health crises.

“They pick winners and losers every single day,” Ratevosian said. “They punish people who don’t subscribe to their beliefs, and that is carried over to foreign assistance — and that’s a recipe for danger.”

The risky, radical future of foreign aid

Odera, the community health worker, is choosing to not care about those concerns right now, because for the first time in a long time, she feels optimistic. She’s frustrated that Kenya’s agreement with the US has gotten caught up in the courts.

“Anything that improves the health security of our country is good for me,” Odera said, who is convinced that soon enough, with money going into the Kenyan government’s hands, the benefits will trickle down to local health workers like herself. All she’s asking for is a minimum wage, which in Kenya, is about $120 per month.

It will take months, maybe years, to see if that materializes. And as hopeful as Odera is, even she worries there’s a risk that, without proper oversight, the money could easily be lost to mismanagement. For what it’s worth, studies on the effects of bilateral aid on corruption have had mixed results, with some researchers finding little association between the two, and others finding a significant risk, especially when aid doesn’t come with anti-corruption requirements. Under the previous USAID model, despite the Trump administration’s claims, evidence shows that corruption was rare. Well-resourced NGOs tend to have established systems for keeping their accounting in order, for example, even in very fragile contexts like Afghanistan, where audits by USAID found that only about 0.4 percent of funds ever strayed from their intended purposes. The Trump administration fired the USAID watchdog charged with monitoring corruption back in February of last year.

And every global health expert I spoke with for this story agreed that in the long run, moving more money into local hands is a good thing. US presidents have been trying and mostly failing to do so for years. But nobody has ever dared to do it so quickly — and for good reason.

Yes, the NGO industrial complex was flawed. But it also played a crucial role in making HIV a much less deadly disease around the world and helped make it the safest time in history to be a child. It often found ways to protect those who face discrimination or live on the margins, including women and LGBTQ people, even when their governments chose not to. And we very well may miss it when it’s gone.

“If there is an advantage to the abruptness [of the Trump administration’s changes], it’s that people have to take it seriously immediately,” said Mankad of Doctors Without Borders. “But if there’s a disadvantage, it’s that the bottom could fall out right away.”

In a perfect world, there would be no need for NGOs. There would be no need for foreign aid. Odera and other local health workers like her would earn the salaries they deserve without having to rely on often capricious aid flowing from the powers that be in Washington, DC.

But we don’t live in that world. And so far, it’s entirely unclear whether the Trump administration’s blustery, bullying approach will even come close to ushering in the vision of a world without a need for foreign aid, one in which people like Odera can thrive. But for many people in the poorest nations, the road ahead could be deadly — or at least very rough. For many of these countries, the co-investment that Trump’s deals require may be far too expensive to sustain, and the logistics too complicated to organize overnight.

Even so, this structural shift is probably permanent. Future US administrations may eventually bring more NGOs back into the fold to backstop local governments and help ensure the continuation of care for those who need it — but the era of largely bypassing recipient governments is rightfully, incontrovertibly coming to an end.

“It aligns with where the momentum is elsewhere in global health, and what the demands of African countries have been for some time,” Bonnifield said. “It will be hard to come back from this.”

OpenAI accidentally built one of the world’s richest charities. Now what?

2026-03-24T15:58:44-04:00

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026, in Washington, DC. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

When Sam Altman first told her that he’d never let OpenAI go corporate, that what he and his colleagues were building was too powerful to be driven by investors, Catherine Bracy more or less believed him.

The conversation took place in 2022, when Bracy, CEO and founder of the social mobility-focused nonprofit TechEquity, was interviewing Altman for a book she was writing about the dangers of venture capital. It was before Altman’s mysterious firing and unfiring a year later, after which he mostly stopped responding to Bracy’s texts.

And ever since then, OpenAI — which was initially founded as a nonprofit in 2015 to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” — has been publicly trying to escape the confines of its charitable roots. Today, OpenAI contains both a corporate arm focused on building and selling AI and a nonprofit arm with a stated mission of ensuring that AI benefits people.

During the controversial process of trying to fully sever the two in 2024, OpenAI lost about half of its AI safety staffers and much of its senior leadership. That was followed by an intensified scrutiny from state attorneys general, nonprofit legal experts, competitor companies, effective altruists, Nobel Prize winners, vast swaths of California’s philanthropic community, and one of its original funders, Elon Musk. Different sides had different interests, but the overall argument was that shifting to a for-profit model would create a fiduciary duty to investors that would inherently clash with its original mission of safety and public benefit.

Is OpenAI’s new foundation a $180 billion distraction?

Last October, OpenAI agreed to make its nonprofit arm very rich. The OpenAI Foundation is now worth about $180 billion and it has two main objectives:
- Helping the world adapt to and benefit from AI by giving money to charity.
- Acting as a moral compass for OpenAI the company, especially when it comes to safety and security decisions.
The foundation has already given away about $40.5 million so far, a small fraction of the billions it plans to eventually donate. But critics see the donations as a distraction.
While OpenAI says its foundation has the final say on security and safety-related decisions, the company has come under scrutiny in recent months for striking a deal with the Pentagon, fighting against statewide AI legislation, and testing ads for free users.
Even if the foundation does eventually give away billions of dollars, it may never be enough to make up for what the public lost in allowing OpenAI to go corporate.

Nonetheless, OpenAI did finally strike a contortive restructuring deal last October. Essentially, the for-profit arm became what is known as a public benefit corporation (PBC), called the OpenAI Group. The original nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation, which has a 26 percent stake currently worth $180 billion in the PBC, plus a sliver of exclusive legal control over certain major decisions.

One effect of the transition was that it essentially required OpenAI to put a number on what it owed the public for converting what had been a project for all humanity into something that most directly benefits the company’s investors. The resulting stake of the OpenAI Foundation is big enough to instantly make it one of the wealthiest charities in the country, or in OpenAI’s words, the “best-equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen.” On paper, at least, the foundation is now significantly richer than the entire country of Luxembourg. Even the Gates Foundation has only $77.6 billion in assets, less than half of what the OpenAI Foundation can draw from, though it’s important to note that most of the wealth of the OpenAI Foundation is locked in fairly illiquid shares within the still private company, which limits how quickly any money can be given away.

Still, its sheer size means that the OpenAI Foundation stands to eventually be a transformative presence on the philanthropic stage, one way or another. But while OpenAI says the foundation will eventually give out many billions of dollars in philanthropy to ensure that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” it’s uncertain that a socially beneficial philanthropy can exist side by side with a company that is fighting an existential battle over who will dominate the AI industry.

“The unspoken truth here is that they’re never going to make a decision that is bad for the company,” Bracy said. “These two entities cannot live under the same roof” where “the mission is in control.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

The foundation’s first gifts came in the form of $40.5 million in no-strings-attached grants to over 200 community nonprofits, like churches, food banks, and afterschool programs. Notably, most grantees had little to no connection to AI or technology — and just as notably, several of these early grantees just so happen to be members of EyesOnOpenAI, a coalition of California nonprofits critical of OpenAI’s privatization that formed in 2025.

But there are signs the foundation will soon pivot into grantmaking that’s more obviously relevant to the company’s original charter, which aimed to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly distributed while also prioritizing long-term safety in the technology’s development. On Feb. 19, OpenAI — the company, not the foundation — announced a $7.5 million grant in conjunction with Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon, and other major tech companies for a new, international project aimed at researching how to make AI systems safer. And on March 24, the OpenAI Foundation debuted a new website, announcing a new pledge to give at least $1 billion this year to scientific research and other causes, and a few new hires, including Jacob Trefethen, who was previously managing director at Coefficient Giving.

“The unspoken truth here is that they’re never going to make a decision that is bad for the company.”
Catherine Bracy, TechEquity founder and CEO

But even so, the real questions around the OpenAI Foundation have less to do with how much it is giving and to whom than whether it is actually able to carry out its contractual oversight role. In theory, the foundation should be ensuring that OpenAI is the standard-bearer for ethical decision-making at the frontier of AI development. That would be a unique contribution to the field — and an embodiment of OpenAI’s original mission — that no amount of grantmaking could replace. Yet, a series of troubling recent decisions by the company hardly seems to bear out that vision.

OpenAI has begun its new corporate journey by debuting ads on its free tier service, firing an executive who raised safety concerns about a soon-to-come NSFW mode for ChatGPT on charges of sexual discrimination against a male colleague, and burning cash while its president funnels millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s super PAC. OpenAI President Greg Brockman has also teamed up with the private equity firm Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir’s co-founders to fund a $125 million super PAC aimed at promoting AI-friendly policies. Along with Google, xAI, and Anthropic, OpenAI has also come under scrutiny in recent weeks for its defense contracts with the Pentagon.

When OpenAI succeeded in its campaign to cede its foundational new technology from nonprofit control, it opened the door for many of these decisions. Even $180 billion in charity might not be enough to make up for the difference.

How OpenAI shed its nonprofit skin

Corporate charity is ubiquitous in the tech world, especially among the biggest players. Microsoft plans to donate $4 billion in cash and AI cloud technology to schools and nonprofits by 2030. Google gives away some $100 million annually, often to organizations focused on artificial intelligence and technology.

But from the beginning, OpenAI was different. Rather than making money and giving some of it to charity, OpenAI was the charity. It was founded as a nonprofit research lab with about $1 billion in start-up donations, mostly from tech titans like Altman, Brockman, and Elon Musk.

There are some structural advantages to being a charity. You can’t accept investments, but you can accept donations and you don’t have to pay most taxes. What’s more, in those early days, OpenAI’s stated mission — to build safe AI without the pressures of financial incentive — gave it a major boost when it came to recruitment for rarified talent. Machine learning prodigy Ilya Sutskever told Wired in 2016 that he chose to leave Google to become OpenAI’s chief scientist “to a very large extent, because of its mission.”

But there were limits to being a fully nonprofit entity. In pursuit of financing amid the rising computing costs of cutting-edge AI, OpenAI created its capped-profit subsidiary in 2019 to manage a new $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Three years later, ChatGPT took the world by storm. Sutskever, and other members of OpenAI’s board, tried and ultimately failed to oust Altman amid accusations of dishonesty in 2023. (Altman denied those accusations.) In 2024 — one year after Sutskever and other members of OpenAI’s board tried and ultimately failed to oust Altman amid accusations of dishonesty — the organization announced its intention to go fully corporate and splinter off the nonprofit into its own fully independent entity.

The transition to for-profit “just didn’t smell right,” said Orson Aguilar, head of LatinoProsperity, an economic justice nonprofit and Bracy’s co-leader at EyesOnOpenAI. He wasn’t alone: By early 2025, a dozen former OpenAI employees filed an amicus brief aimed at stopping the conversion because it would “fundamentally violate its mission.” And more than 60 nonprofit, philanthropy, and labor leaders, many of them based in OpenAI’s home state of California, agreed that the attempt to privatize felt unfair given the extent to which the company benefited from its tax-free status during its early development.

One surprising thing

To grasp what this all means, try thinking of OpenAI’s for-profit arm as an angsty tween and the nonprofit as her well-meaning, but often powerless parent. For years, the tween had been allowed to do her own thing, but only within certain limits — she still had to do her homework and get home by a certain time. Now imagine, she’s sick of having a curfew. “Nobody else has one!” She still lives in her mother’s house, but she wants to follow her own rules.

That’s kind of what happened here. Up until now, OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary had a capped-profit model, meaning there were limits on how much money investors could make. But this new deal paved the way for the for-profit to become a full-time corporate girlie, charitable bylaws be damned. And while OpenAI’s new public benefit corporation still technically exists under the original nonprofit’s control, it mostly follows its own rules. It can raise as much money as it wants and eventually, it will likely go public.

But California history did provide some hope that the public might at least get some meaningful benefit from the transition. Back in the 1990s, California’s branch of the health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield — then a nonprofit called Blue Cross of California — decided to privatize. After some haggling with state regulators, the company agreed to forfeit all of its assets, worth $3.2 billion, to a pair of independent nonprofits in exchange for going private. The result was the California Endowment, which is now the state’s largest health foundation.

Many nonprofit leaders in California hoped that OpenAI, which is headquartered in the state, would strike a similar deal, ceding a majority of its assets to a fully independent nonprofit. And those assets were and are enormous.

Gary Mendoza, a former state official who oversaw the Blue Cross deal, estimated the OpenAI nonprofit’s rightful assets at over $250 billion, or half the company’s $500 billion worth. “Anything short of 50 percent,” he told the San Francisco Examiner last year, “is a missed opportunity.” And beyond money for the public, assuming the nonprofit kept its shares, it would add up to enough influence to really shape OpenAI’s corporate decision-making at a key moment for the future of artificial intelligence.

Given that the OpenAI Foundation ended up with little more than a quarter of the final company, this is obviously not what happened. But EyesOnOpenAI’s years-long lobbying effort was not a total bust. The criticism proved powerful enough that last May, OpenAI was forced to give up on an initial plan to restructure away its nonprofit assets into a new organization wholly disconnected from OpenAI, which would have left the nonprofit with no legal control over the for-profit arm.

On paper, the new deal includes some meaningful concessions. It contractually requires the nonprofit mission to come first on safety and security issues, with no regard to shareholder interests. The memorandum also calls on OpenAI to “mitigate risks to teens” specifically. It made the foundation the controlling shareholder of the corporation, affording it the right to appoint corporate directors and oversee critical decisions like a sale.

If OpenAI abided by all of its terms and eventually started giving away billions of dollars of philanthropy each year, then the world — or at least California, where many of OpenAI’s grants have been concentrated — could stand to greatly benefit from it.

Random acts of corporate kindness

And this brings us to the $40.5 million that OpenAI gave to over 200 nonprofits toward the end of last year.

Many of these charities applied to the grant with sophisticated ideas around how to help their communities integrate or adapt to AI, though they can ultimately use the grants however they see fit. Among them were public libraries, Boys and Girls Clubs, churches, food banks, and legal aid nonprofits. Coming at a moment when the majority of the country’s nonprofits face existential funding cuts, “it was just the perfect timing,” said Thomas Howard Jr, head of Kidznotes, a North Carolina nonprofit focused on music education that received $45,000 in OpenAI’s first round of grants.

“There’s nothing I’ve seen that gives me reassurance that they’ll catch the important safety issues when they come up — or that they’ll be doing a thorough investigation of the grantmaking opportunities.”
Tyler Johnston, Midas Project executive director

So civil society’s fight over the OpenAI transition won at least enough concessions to help these worthy organizations and retain some semblance of nonprofit control over some of the for-profit’s activities. So why do so many people in the philanthropic community remain so negative about the foundation?

“I’m all for nonprofits getting money,” said Bracy, the head of TechEquity. “I don’t begrudge any organizations that took the money, but I don’t think it’s some indication that OpenAI is living up to the mission of the nonprofit.”

$40.5 million, of course, is only 0.02 percent of the OpenAI Foundation’s on-paper $180 billion windfall. How the foundation will eventually spend the other 99.98 percent remains to be seen, though the foundation has said that at least $25 billion will ultimately go to scientific research and what it’s calling “technical solutions for AI resilience.” The company plans to announce a second wave of grants directed at organizations using AI to work across issues like health in the coming months, and says it will give at least $1 billion to various causes by year’s end.

“We are doing the important work of engaging with experts, learning from communities, and shaping a point of view of where Foundation investments can make the greatest difference,” the OpenAI Foundation’s board of directors said in response to a request for clarity on where future funding will go. “We look forward to sharing more soon.”

But so far, critics remain skeptical. OpenAI has done little to prove that its newfound philanthropy is more than just “a smoke and mirrors show,” argued one member of the Coalition for AI Nonprofit Integrity (CANI) — a coalition composed largely of AI insiders, including former OpenAI employees, furiously opposed to the restructuring. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from OpenAI, which has accused CANI of being a front funded by Musk. (CANI has denied receiving any such funds — though not for lack of trying. If you scroll to the bottom of OpenTheft, a website created by CANI, you’ll find a direct plea to Musk for donations.)

Critics of OpenAI say the company is not doing enough to ensure its technology develops safely, regardless of how much its foundation gives to charity.

| Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images" />

The company has yet to announce an executive director for its grantmaking arm, though it did reveal several senior appointments to the foundation in March, including Trefethen and OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba. For now, with the exception of Zico Kolter, the head of the nonprofit’s safety committee, the foundation board still shares the same members as the corporate board, including CEO Sam Altman. The idea is that these board members can put on different hats when meeting about nonprofit versus corporate priorities, asserting the foundation’s oversight when needed. But it has created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

When asked for mechanisms and examples for how the foundation has responded to situations where its mission conflicts with shareholder interests, given the overlapping board membership, the spokesperson said that OpenAI has conflict-of-interest policies and governance procedures in place to ensure its directors only consider the mission when they meet, as they regularly do, about nonprofit issues.

The company also said the foundation board constantly exercises its oversight role, including for all new major product releases, like the release of GPT‑5.3‑Codex, an advanced agentic coding model, last month. The AI watchdog group the Midas Project, a frequent thorn in OpenAI’s side, accused the company of violating safety standards, an allegation that OpenAI fervently denied.

In any case, since the OpenAI Foundation is not a separate entity with its own independent board, some critics have compared it to other feel-good corporate social responsibility ventures, like the McDonald’s Ronald McDonald House, Walmart’s healthy foods program, and Home Depot’s work with veterans.

Corporate social responsibility has its place, and it can do real good. But Bracy believes that based on the OpenAI Foundation’s structuring and how they’ve conducted their grantmaking so far, it will probably never fund anything “they see as a threat to the growth of the company,” said Bracy, despite the fact that the need for guardrails on unrestricted AI development featured prominently in the company’s original mission. “They’re going to do what’s best for the bottom line of the for-profit.”

Critics like Bracy also doubt the OpenAI Foundation’s other main prerogative, which is to govern all safety and ethics-related issues for the broader organization, including the responsibility to review new products.

“Instead of a vehicle to serve humanity, it’s become a vehicle to serve one individual and a few of his friends and investors.”
Anonymous member of CANI

While the nonprofit and its mission do legally retain control over the OpenAI corporation — particularly when it comes to safety issues — that may add up to little, given that the OpenAI Foundation doesn’t seem to be an independently governed foundation. It is not, in fact, even technically a foundation, but a public charity, which means it is not required to pay out a certain percentage of its assets each year under IRS requirements.

And while the nonprofit retains significant oversight powers on paper — including the authority to halt AI releases it deems unsafe — in practice, critics say, it’s unclear whether it would ever use them.

Increasingly, OpenAI has also been wading into political lobbying efforts that seem at odds with its mission to promote long-term safety in AI development. When California lawmakers were debating SB 53, a law requiring transparency reports from leading AI companies, OpenAI lobbied against it. And the company has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for its contract with the Pentagon, which has blacklisted its rival company Anthropic for raising ethical concerns about the use of its technology.

Why the fight is not over

OpenAI’s new corporate arrangement is very, very new. It’s still possible that OpenAI’s grantmaking arm really does staff up, and the nonprofit builds an independent board that has the power to enforce hard ethical decisions for the company, even when it hurts investors’ returns.

“They have a lot of freedom to continue to do good,” said Tyler Johnston, executive director of the Midas Project, but that would require them to “actually shake things up” and “show that they’ve created the scaffolding that will enable them to actualize their mission.”

But so far, “there’s nothing I’ve seen that gives me reassurance that they’ll catch the important safety issues when they come up,” he said. “Or that they’ll be doing a thorough investigation of the grantmaking opportunities.”

If OpenAI does not abide by the terms of its new contract — if the company, for example, tries to thwart an attempt to roll back a dangerous new tool — then California’s attorney general does have the power to demand answers from the company, and in theory, revisit the agreement’s terms.

Beyond the agreement, there are a few quite public means by which OpenAI’s former lovers, skeptics, and nemeses are still trying to press rewind on the restructuring.

Chief among them is Elon Musk, OpenAI’s most prominent original donor and co-founder. In between trading embarrassing jabs with Altman on X, Musk took OpenAI to court last year over claims that he was “assiduously manipulated” into donating tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit research lab that turned into an “opaque web of for-profit OpenAI affiliates.”

A judge has found enough cause for the case to proceed to trial this April. Musk is suing for up to $134 billion in damages, though OpenAI has told its investors that it believes it would only be on the hook for Musk’s $38 billion in original donations. OpenAI, for its part, has accused Musk of an “unlawful campaign of harassment.”

Meanwhile, CANI is still holding out hope that it can convince the people of California to vote for a hyperspecific ballot measure, the California Charitable Assets Protection Act, which could reverse the decision to allow OpenAI — or any other “organizations developing transformative technologies” — to go corporate.

“They’re cutting corners on safety because of the race to artificial general intelligence that they just want to win,” said the member of CANI. “Instead of a vehicle to serve humanity, it’s become a vehicle to serve one individual and a few of his friends and investors.”

So maybe the fight over OpenAI’s restructuring isn’t completely over — but it’s probably on its last legs. And if they continue on the same path, it’s unlikely that the public will ever really benefit in the way they ought to, given the charitable benefits OpenAI enjoyed in its early days. At the very least, $40.5 million is just not going to cut it. Even $180 billion might fall far short.

“I think it’s them saying, ‘Listen, I dare you to enforce this,’” said Bracy, who believes OpenAI is “banking on the fact that they’re worth almost a trillion dollars, and they have endless resources — and the state of California does not.”

Update, March 24, 2026, 4 pm ET: This story, first published March 18, has been updated to include new announcements from OpenAI on giving and new hires.

How to help everyday people suffering in Iran — and beyond

2026-03-16T17:59:20-04:00

The Iran war has led to a mounting humanitarian crisis across the Middle East, and threatens to harm many more people near and far. | Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP via Getty Images

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In the less than two weeks since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the war has already killed over 1,900 people across 11 countries and displaced up to 3.2 million people. It has destroyed schools, hospitals, and critical infrastructure across the region, and threatens to plunge countries near and far — many of which rely on now-disrupted shipping routes for fuel and fertilizer — into economic and humanitarian crises.

If the escalating conflict feels to you like one more in a long slog of painfully violent, complex global crises, then you are not wrong. There are indeed more wars and armed conflicts today than there have been at any time since the end of World War II. Over one-fifth of the world’s kids now live in places warped by conflict, which magnifies poverty and hunger. And conflict doesn’t just worsen conditions on the ground — it makes getting humanitarian aid flowing to those who need it most an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous task.

But difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Local aid workers across the region have been working nonstop to get civilians safely fed and cared for, while new methods of crisis response mean that the world may soon be able to move money much more quickly to the people and places that need it most. And while just how long this war will continue may only be known to President Donald Trump, these organizations will need support to fuel long-term recovery for those both directly and indirectly affected by the violence. The fighting has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping lane between Iran and Oman that supplies about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and more than a third of the world’s fertilizer. A prolonged closure could quickly devolve into a major global food crisis, including a spike in hunger in the countries most vulnerable to it.

For the average person, thinking about how to help in a conflict like this can feel daunting, to say the least. It might even seem pointless against the sheer momentum of war. If you can’t solve everything — if the war has no end in sight — then why bother with Band-Aid solutions at all?

But people need help now, so they can make it to the day after. And with global aid cuts siphoning off support for humanitarian relief organizations even as conflict spikes, your donations are genuinely more important than ever. Here’s how to help.

Give to organizations already on the ground

One way to think about the complexities of getting aid to a conflict zone is to imagine a natural disaster that lasts not for hours or days, but for weeks, months, or years on end. “With a hurricane or flood, the hazard has likely passed” by the time aid starts pouring in, said Patricia McIlreavy, CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy.

But when it comes to complex manmade humanitarian disasters like war, “that hazard is continuing,” she said, meaning that the damage and logistical challenges of coordinating relief in the fog of war can quickly compound as time goes on.

If you’re in the US, giving directly to organizations based in Iran is complicated by American sanctions on the country, though humanitarian projects are generally exempt. But you can donate to global relief organizations, like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Norwegian Refugee Council, many of which do work in Iran and across the region.

Other groups, like Project HOPE, are actively monitoring the needs of many Iranian refugees, while focusing their relief efforts on the fallout among Iran’s most vulnerable neighbors.

In Lebanon, home to the world’s highest refugee population per capita, escalating hostilities have led to a mounting humanitarian crisis in a country still recovering from its last war with Israel, which technically ended in 2024. Even prior to the new hostilities, Lebanon was experiencing a severe economic collapse, with nearly 70 percent of the country in need of humanitarian assistance.

Trusted aid groups like Jesuit Refugee Service, the International Rescue Committee, Project HOPE, Humanity & Inclusion, and Relief International have longstanding teams on the ground working with local partners to offer emergency health services, food, shelter, and mental health support to people in Lebanon and across the region.
Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been ramping up medical and humanitarian support across the region since the war began.
Anera has decades of experience distributing aid in Lebanon, and has been providing food, hygiene kits, bedding, and mattresses to those displaced.
Save the Children is distributing child-focused supplies and responding to the needs of children and families impacted by airstrikes in Lebanon and around the region.
GlobalGiving has a rolling relief fund providing flexible support to vetted, local organizations across the region, including in Lebanon.
The World Food Program and World Central Kitchen have both launched funds to rush food aid to those displaced by the conflict.

Many of these organizations are doing their best to actively deploy resources where they anticipate the greatest needs will be. “They don’t know how things are going to settle,” said McIlreavy. “They don’t know where they’re going to have access. And so they’re going to need to be flexible.”

That goes for their supporters as well.

What about sending money to people directly?

The bulk of humanitarian aid still passes through established charities and agencies like the United Nations. But there’s also the increasingly popular idea of sending cash directly to people, something that has been done informally for centuries through remittances and mutual aid.

A growing body of research shows that even in fragile conflict zones, people often strongly prefer receiving cash — which they can then spend however they need to — over relief items like food parcels, hygiene kits, or blankets. The nonprofit GiveDirectly has pioneered the use of technology to get cash aid to people fast, and is actively exploring how to help those affected by this conflict through a newly launched emergency fund.

Historically, most of GiveDirectly’s work has focused on people living in extreme poverty, rather than specifically targeting those living in conflict zones. But the organization has also more recently expanded to providing emergency relief to families affected by conflicts like the Yemeni civil war and armed clashes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

One way the group works is through cellphone metadata, which can help identify people who are likely in need. In this case, that may include displaced people in Lebanon, Iranian refugees entering Turkey, or Malawians affected by rising fertilizer costs. GiveDirectly then screens those people for eligibility via text, and sends them cash through mobile payment platforms.

The process tends to be “cleaner, faster, more objective, and cheaper” than more traditional outreach methods like knocking door-to-door, said Leith Baker, who runs GiveDirectly’s emergency cash strategy. It’s a “really protective, dignified way to receive money” that “gives the recipient a lot of choice and protection.”

Once the group’s outreach system is in place, it also works exceptionally fast, which makes it an especially promising option for people in rapidly evolving conflict zones. You can help GiveDirectly with its plans to send cash to those affected by the conflict by donating here.

For other ways to send cash directly, plenty of local advocates in Lebanon and across the region have also begun creating and sharing mutual aid funds for local families and organizations, like Nation Station, a volunteer-led community kitchen in Beirut, Lebanon.

Helping people for the long haul

While those who live in range of the bombs are at the greatest risk, many of those most affected will include people who don’t live in the region at all. Those in already deeply impoverished countries will be the most vulnerable to the conflict’s economic ripple effects, which already include surging prices on food, fertilizer, and fuel. There are plenty of groups working to support communities in crisis both now and long after the news cycle fades.

The Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Global Recovery Fund directs funds to local organizations that need it most in the aftermath of both natural and manmade disasters.
GiveDirectly has a standing fund to deliver emergency cash in the aftermath of disasters, as well as one for families facing extreme poverty more broadly.
Action Against Hunger works to fight hunger and build stronger food systems around the world, which could help make countries more resilient to price shocks.

Even prior to this escalating crisis, the world was already on the verge of a grim milestone. For the first time in decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty is projected to start increasing by 2030, with most of it highly concentrated in the poorest — and often most conflict-affected — countries.

Global aid cuts have been making a bad situation even worse. And now, for the most vulnerable countries, the Iran war could cause far more than just higher prices at the grocery store, but also prolonged, widespread food shortages. It’s more important than ever to dig deep now to support those suffering the worst fallout.

“Even if the conflict was to end tomorrow,” said McIlreavy, “the recovery will take a long time.”

Update, March 12, 1 pm ET: This story has been updated with information regarding the number of Iranian people who have been displaced by bombings.

Punch the monkey needs more than your love

2026-02-27T11:30:37-05:00

If you’d do anything for the internet’s favorite baby monkey, start with this. | Jiji Press/AFP

Much like their human cousins, baby macaques crave comfort.

Punch, a forlorn-looking young Japanese macaque monkey, went viral last week after being pictured clinging to an orange IKEA orangutan plushie at Japan’s Ichikawa City Zoo. Abandoned by his mother after being born in captivity, baby Punch has struggled to make friends in his concrete enclosure, even as his far-flung human fans fall madly, swiftly, deeply in love.

As easy as it is to love Punch, though, it is much harder to address the structures that put him in this position in the first place. While the internet loves baby animals, it often fails them when they’re not in the spotlight.

Take Moo Deng, for example, the pygmy hippopotamus who went viral for her sass after biting zookeepers at the height of brat summer in 2024. Just last week, a conservationist raised concerns about the “sad” state of Moo Deng’s and her mother’s enclosure, which zoo officials now plan to expand. And despite the mini hippo’s astronomical fame, there has been no accompanying surge in funding to protect Moo Deng’s endangered kin in the wild, of which there are only 2,500 left.

It’s also worth noting here that, as a general rule, whether you’re a macaque or a pygmy hippo, most zoos are no great place to raise a family. My colleague Kenny Torrella has written about the acute psychological distress — dubbed “zoochosis” — that some animals experience in captivity, which could also help explain part of Punch’s own painful maladjustment.

As a result of their small enclosures and lack of stimulation, animals with zoochosis develop strange compulsive behaviors — like pacing or rocking back and forth — and in some disturbing cases, self-harm, like hair pulling or self-biting.

What your favorite internet-famous baby animal really needs

Just as most zoos exist primarily for human entertainment, so too do most viral animal sensations. “We seek out cuteness because it feels good,” Joshua Paul Dale, who wrote a book on the subject, told National Geographic in 2024. In theory, “feeling the desire to protect, care for, and play with a cute baby or animal, even if it’s only an image on our social media feed, encourages empathy and compassion.”

But in practice, viral cuteness rarely translates into improved conditions or profound shifts in empathy for suffering animals, famous or otherwise.

This matters because even as the world dotes on Punch, rightfully sensing his capacity for complex emotions, it could be doing a lot more to protect him and animals like him.

As Vox senior reporter Marina Bolotnikova has written, Japanese macaques — alongside rhesus macaques, baboons, and squirrel monkeys — are among the research animals used for testing drugs and other treatments.

Before Punch, there was the researcher Harry Harlow’s infamous monkey lab, where, in a 1950s study of infant-maternal bonding, baby rhesus macaques were traumatically separated from their mothers right after birth and given a surrogate monkey-shaped doll covered in a terry towel. More recently, the National Institutes of Health defunded a set of vision experiments by the Harvard University neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone that involved sewing shut the eyelids of infant monkeys.

You might assume that because this kind of testing is very expensive — costing up to $50,000 to purchase each monkey — and ethically uncomfortable, to put it lightly, that such treatment only occurs because it is absolutely scientifically necessary. That’s not the case.

“Past research in primates might have contributed to the advancement of medicine, but it is evident that the advanced methods now available have rendered it virtually obsolete,” Michael Metzler, an emergency physician at Pioneer Memorial Hospital, told Bolotnikova. “These monkey studies divert funds and attention from the more valuable human-centered studies.”

In a very rare win for science under the Trump administration, the tide is turning, to some extent, against this kind of flagrantly cruel animal experimentation, especially on monkeys. But millions of animals still suffer from isolating captivity and exploitation in labs, zoos, circuses, or the exotic pet trade.

Making the world a better place for animals like Punch doesn’t come from views online or a visit to the zoo, but from sustained pressure for better animal welfare. There’s the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates specifically for animal-free scientific research, for example, and Born Free USA, where you can “adopt a monkey” rescued from exploitative places like zoos and labs. The International Primate Protection League also focuses on promoting the conservation and protection of primates worldwide, while the Macaque Coalition is a network of organizations specifically concerned with the abuse or exploitation of macaques globally.

If you would really do anything for Punch, if he activated your parental instincts like no other macaque has before, then advocating for better conditions for animals like him is probably the best place to start. I assure you, he already has plenty of plushies.

One of America’s best foreign aid programs is back from the dead

2026-02-25T18:06:21-05:00

One year after the dissolution of USAID, the agency’s pioneering research and development lab is now back as an independent nonprofit. | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Every great new discovery has to start somewhere.

Penicillin was born out of moldy petri dishes followed by years of experimental testing. The Spice Girls started with an open audition, months of rehearsals in a shared house, and demo tapes stolen in the name of girl power. When it comes to US foreign aid, the engine behind new discoveries tackling enormous global challenges was a tiny program called Development Innovation Ventures, or DIV.

Like the rest of the US Agency for International Development, DIV — which cost less than 12 cents per American per year to run — was dismantled within the first few months of the second Trump administration. Many vital projects, like a new low-cost, electricity-free respiratory kit for helping babies breathe, were cut off from support even as they “were moments away from the finish line,” said Sasha Gallant, who led DIV under USAID.

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As broad swaths of global health architecture plunged into survival mode, the world also lost a cutting-edge clearinghouse for finding out what works and what doesn’t work in foreign aid. It was one of the only programs in the world laser-focused not only on saving people’s lives now, but also on learning how to save many more lives in the future.

But now, one year later, DIV is back — and under new management. Instead of being an entity under USAID, former leaders have spun the program into a newly-formed independent nonprofit called the DIV Fund. Backed by private philanthropy, including a $45 million grant from Coefficient Giving, the slow and steady work of building a brighter future can continue.

“It was hard to even think about innovation early in the year. It was like the house was on fire, and we’ve just got to get the kids out of the house,” said Gallant, who co-founded the new fund. But ultimately, “you also have to have better houses. We have to have better tools to extinguish the fires.”

For one possibility, look to Guatemala, where corn figures into almost every meal. DIV-backed program Semilla Nueva is literally seeding a new treatment for malnutrition by connecting local farmers with maize bred to contain higher levels of zinc, iron, and protein. There’s also Uganda — where Health Access Connect is building a fleet of motorcycle taxis to bring health professionals to remote villages — and Bangladesh, where the ARCED Foundation is fighting air pollution using data and satellite imagery.

DIV’s work differs from other NGOs that tend to fund solutions that are already standard practice, and only rarely invest in incubating and testing out brand new approaches. DIV supports organizations as they pilot and pressure test those projects to see if they really work in practice. If the evidence says they do, then — and only then — will DIV then help those organizations scale up.

This model served DIV — and by extension, the world — very well during its 15-year stint at USAID. In 2021, a group of economists including Gallant and Nobel-winning cofounder Michael Kremer estimated that the $19.2 million DIV spent in its first three years generated $281 million in social benefits, which is a fancy way of saying that DIV helped an extraordinary number of people live longer, healthier, more prosperous lives. That wouldn’t have been possible without careful investments in research and development.

“People come to know the programs that are tremendously effective,” like investing in teachers, handing out malaria nets, or getting kids vaccinated, said Gallant. “But somebody had to figure out that those worked.”

As an independent nonprofit, the DIV Fund won’t have nearly as much money or resources as it did at USAID. This year, the fund will grant out about $25 million per year, just under half of what it could give before. You can help them overcome that gap by donating to their work here.

But even so, DIV’s real potential has always come from punching above its weight, especially in moments when the good ideas it finds eventually catapult into the mainstream. Gallant said the fund’s ultimate goal is to continue connecting with partners — including philanthropists, national governments, and multilateral organizations — to ensure that innovation is “not just happening in an R&D shop” but rather “meaningfully influencing” decisions about where to steer funds in the real world.

And if the US government ever comes knocking again, she says they’ll welcome it with open arms. The doors are “entirely open,” said Gallant, and “will remain open to any partner trying to think about how to integrate evidence-driven innovation into large-scale programming.”

America’s culture wars are killing people overseas

2026-01-29T16:01:05-05:00

Nurse Matild Zainab Kamara displays some contraceptive products used during family planning counselling sessions at the Planned Parenthood Sexual Reproductive Health Clinic in Freetown, on November 12, 2025. | Saidu Bah/AFP via Getty Images

“The mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded,” Vice President JD Vance bellowed to a crowd of zoomer nuns, bagpipers, and white nationalists at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, last Friday.

The vice president then proceeded to announce a threefold expansion of the Mexico City policy, a decades-old, controversial foreign policy that prohibits organizations from receiving foreign aid if they mention abortion as a family planning option. It was reinstated last year when President Donald Trump resumed office.

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While it’s not uncommon for (usually Republican) administrations to reinstate it, this is only the second time the policy — which critics call the “global gag rule” — has been expanded. It now also prohibits talk of “gender ideology” or diversity, equity, and inclusion for all forms of assistance. The extended policy indicates that the administration will now be casting an even wider net against anything deemed woke, including groups that explicitly serve LGBTQ people, like a clinic that serves transgender people, for example, or that explicitly advocate for the rights of marginalized groups, such as funding a local school for an Indigenous community.

“This is about weaponizing U.S. foreign assistance to promote an ideological agenda,” Keifer Buckingham, managing director for the Council for Global Equality, told NPR last week.

The changes come almost exactly one year to the day since Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing billions of dollars in lifesaving aid, setting in motion the final death knell for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Researchers now credibly estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died in the aftermath, as their health clinics closed, their food aid vanished, and their HIV infections went undiagnosed.

And while the Trump administration has moved in recent months to restore some funding for crucial health programs — like PEPFAR and the Global Fund — the expansion of the Mexico City policy means that many of the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized people, particularly mothers and young children, will continue to suffer disproportionately from the consequences of cuts.

In low-income countries, many women’s health organizations end up taking on the brunt of not only local family planning, but also reproductive and maternity care, cervical cancer screenings, HIV treatment, children’s health services, and resources for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. When the Mexico City policy disqualifies these groups from receiving funds, it affects all of those services too, leading to spikes in intimate partner violence, nutritional deficits in children, and HIV infections.

Paradoxically, research has consistently shown that the policy actually increases the number of abortions in countries receiving aid, because it disrupts people’s access to contraceptives. It also makes giving birth much less safe. One study estimated that during the first Trump administration, an additional 108,000 mothers and children died because their local health providers did not pass the rule’s sniff test. This amounted to over 1,300 canceled grants and at least $153 million in lost funding, every dollar of which meant fewer HIV testing kits, malaria nets, and baby formula for people in need.

This time around, the Trump administration has already slashed funding to most of these organizations. Trump slashed upwards of 90 percent of funding for maternal and child health organizations and family planning and reproductive health, compared with 38 percent in cuts to foreign aid overall. While it’s difficult to predict the full toll, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands of mothers and young children will likely die as a result.

The expanded Mexico City policy will now apply not only to foreign-run organizations — as it has in the past — but also to US-based organizations that work overseas, multilaterals like the United Nations, and potentially, foreign governments. It previously applied to a tranche of about $8 billion worth of global health funding, but now applies to over $30 billion of non-military foreign assistance.

Many groups will likely find themselves forced to choose between discontinuing services for some of the vulnerable populations they serve — or forfeiting a vital stream of funding.

If you want to help make sure their work continues, then now is a good time to show your support. MSI Reproductive Choices, a major provider of family planning services in low-income countries, has lost $15 million due to the reinstated Mexico City policy. Project Resource Optimization also has a database filled with specific lifesaving projects — including for maternal and child health — that were previously funded by USAID.

America’s culture wars should never have been a death sentence for hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of women and children in poor countries. But thanks to Trump and his administration’s petty policies, that’s increasingly what they risk becoming.

How to help the resistance to ICE in Minnesota — and beyond

2026-01-29T12:15:47-05:00

In the wake of ICE shootings in Minneapolis, locals have established vast networks of community resistance. There’s no shortage of ways to help. | Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

In recent weeks, Minnesota has borne the brunt of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration strategy, with federal officials detaining thousands of people, from preschoolers to, occasionally, US citizens. Minnesotans on the ground have responded in turn by establishing remarkable models of community resistance, including vast networks of volunteers monitoring ICE activity, as well as handing out free diapers, food, and other essentials to families in need.

But over the weekend, tensions spiked after federal border patrol agents shot and killed yet another civilian, Alex Pretti, which came 17 days after an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killed Renee Nicole Good.

Such overt violence against immigrants and protesters — often captured in graphic video — has left many Americans feeling aghast, but also powerlessness over how to respond. Even conservatives have begun taking a much harder stance on ICE’s activities, with nearly one in five Republicans voicing support for abolishing the agency in the wake of Pretti’s killing.

At times like these, perhaps the best way to deal with these feelings is to channel them into helping people who need it, not just in Minneapolis, but in your community too. Fortunately there are countless organizations, religious groups, and mutual aid networks that have organized tirelessly over the past year or more to protect vulnerable populations. And it’s never too late for you to join them, whether through donating to immigrant groups, volunteering your time, or your advocacy for more humane policies.

Here’s how to help.

Where to donate and volunteer in Minnesota

If you want to support immigrants and their supporters in Minneapolis specifically, two local volunteers have created an extensive repository called Stand With Minnesota, filled with nonprofits, mutual aid networks, and crowdfunding links for specific schools, neighborhoods, and families that need support.

You can choose from an immigrant-serving nonprofit that’s over a century old to a GoFundMe offering rent relief in the same neighborhood where Good was killed. If you want someone else to make the decision for you on where to donate, the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund is a pooled philanthropic fund from the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota that can direct your donation to where it’s needed most.

Among the options that Stand With Minnesota offers are funds for purchasing safety equipment or links to buy dash cams for legal observers documenting ICE activities. These resources are important because they help volunteers safely capture the way ICE operates in their neighborhoods, shedding a light on their activities and ultimately offering evidence for accountability if abuse occurs.

If you do live in Minnesota, there are plenty of groups that train volunteer legal observers or need volunteers to help support immigrants who are afraid to leave their homes right now because of ICE activity. Some have stopped going to work or school — or even the supermarket — as usual.

The nonprofit Monarca offers training to volunteers on constitutional rights and safety practices for locals who want to become legal observers. So does Defend 612, a local grassroots network of decentralized neighborhood watch groups.
Many food banks, churches, and local community organizations — including the Sanneh Foundation and Twin Cities Food Justice are looking for volunteers to pack up and deliver groceries to immigrant families.
There are plenty of other ways to volunteer. My Pitbull Is Family has been helping vulnerable families take care of their pets, including when an owner is detained by ICE. The People’s Laundry has been helping Minnesotans clean their clothes if they can’t venture to the laundromat. And the Interfaith Coalition on Immigration (ICOM) needs help for all kinds of activities, like accompanying immigrants to federal check-ins, delivering emergency assistance, and doing community outreach.

Why legal aid is one of the most effective ways to support immigrants

The vast majority of those detained in Trump’s immigration crackdown never get to speak to a lawyer. But when they do have legal counsel, they are up to 10.5 times more likely to win the case, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

Here are some other organizations recommended by local activists that focus on providing legal support to immigrant families across the state:

Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota is actively working to connect immigrants affected by ICE’s crackdown in the state with free legal assistance.
Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid is a nonprofit law firm providing free legal services — including immigration help — to Minnesotans in need.
Southeastern Minnesota Interfaith Immigrant Legal Defense provides free legal defense services to immigrants in the state.

If you happen to speak multiple languages, many organizations like the Immigrant Law Center and ICOM need volunteers to help accompany or translate for immigrants navigating the court system, even if you don’t have any legal training. Freedom for Immigrants needs multilingual volunteers to help run its national hotline for people in detention and their families.

Stand with your city

Minnesota may be ground zero of Trump’s immigration crackdown today, but it is far from the only place in the country where families affected by ICE need your support.

Once again, if you have cash to donate, then giving to a local legal aid organization is a great way to make sure that more immigrants see a fair day in court. There are literally hundreds of organizations doing just that in every state of the country.

But if there’s something that we can learn from what’s happening in Minneapolis, it’s that standing with your neighbors really does matter.

For some people — especially US citizens who are far less vulnerable to ICE violence — that might mean connecting with a local organization and training to become a legal observer. (While it is legal to film ICE activities, keep in mind that becoming an observer does have its own risks, with plenty of reports of ICE conducting arrests or becoming physically aggressive.)

But support can also mean volunteering your time with local immigrant-led nonprofits or mutual aid organizations focused on making sure that families get the food, shelter, and support they need to feel safe. It might also be as simple as asking your own friends and neighbors what they need right now — and brushing up on your rights when ICE knocks on your door or enters your neighborhood in the process.

And finally, if you’re an American taxpayer and you’re unhappy with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies, then ICE’s crackdown has been carried out on your dime. So don’t forget to take the two minutes it takes to call your representatives too.

Read all of Vox’s coverage of ICE in Minnesota.

Update, January 29, 12:15 pm ET: This piece was originally published on January 27 and has been updated to remove organizations that have now reached capacity for donations. (Here’s why that matters.)

Americans don’t trust crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. So, why do they keep giving?

2026-01-19T08:58:36-05:00

Today, no American tragedy is complete without a GoFundMe.

It took less than a week to raise over $1.5 million for the family of Renee Nicole Good, the woman fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis earlier this month. At the same time, a parallel fundraiser for her killer raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. And last year saw GoFundMe campaigns for people rebuilding their homes after the Los Angeles wildfires, therapy for the Camp Mystic flood survivors in Texas, struggling families affected by the SNAP shutdown, and far more.

But even as one in five Americans donate directly to those in need through crowdfunding, many feel uneasy about the rise of platforms like GoFundMe, which has raised over $40 billion since 2010, according to a recent survey by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll of 1,146 adults nationwide measured the extent to which Americans now participate in crowdfunding, the details of what that participation now looks like, and the nature of how they perceive crowdfunding campaigns.

The survey found that less than 10 percent of Americans — including both donors and non-donors — felt very confident in the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns, and many harbored serious doubts about who really stands to profit from them. More than half of those surveyed said they had very little confidence that crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe charge reasonable service fees. And nearly as many doubted that crowdfunders themselves use the money they raise responsibly or raise enough to meet their goals at all.

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As I previously reported in October, the evidence shows that some of their fears are justified.

Start with those service fees, which the highest share of survey participants had qualms about. While the for-profit GoFundMe, the biggest name in the game, technically only charges a nominal processing fee like any other fundraiser, the platform defaults donors into “tipping” some 17.5 percent (on my browser, at least) of their donation to benefit the company’s bottom line.

And for a fundraiser as big as the one for Good’s widow, those tips can really add up. If all donors tipped the full 17.5 percent on the $1.5 million campaign, GoFundMe would rake in over $260,000.

Another point of doubt was the idea that many who crowdfund don’t actually need the money and, even if they do, might not use it responsibly. The data on such fraud is difficult to come by, and while GoFundMe claims it affects only about one in 1,000 campaigns on its platform, the disperse nature of crowdfunding makes it virtually impossible to verify whether most fundraisers ultimately use their funds “wisely” or even for their intended purpose at all.

What’s more, Americans’ hunch that few crowdfunds ultimately reach their initial goals is also right on target. Some studies show that as few as one in ten crowdfunding campaigns succeed by that metric. And while every dollar counts, the people who need the most help often struggle to get their fundraiser off the ground at all.

More often than not, the wealthier and whiter the fundraiser’s neighborhood and network is, the more successful their campaign is likely to be, according to several studies measuring the success rate of medical crowdfunds, meaning that many people who need help get left behind.

A week before Good’s shooting, another American citizen, Keith Porter Jr. — a Black father from Los Angeles — was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE officer on New Year’s Eve. Porter had just fired a celebratory shot in the air from an AR-15-style rifle when he was confronted and killed by the agent, who lived in the same apartment complex. Yet, for days, a fundraiser for his family struggled to gain the same traction as the one for Good, who is white. Amid some outcry over the disparity, a GoFundMe for Porter’s daughters has managed to raise nearly $260,000 out of a goal of $300,000.

Still, even though crowdfunding can be a flawed way to give, it’s one of the only venues we have for directly helping individual people in need quickly during times of crisis. According to the AP-NORC survey, medical expenses and health care causes are the most common kind of crowdfunds people donate to, followed by memorials and funeral expenses. Oftentimes, these fundraisers act as a lifeline for people in intense distress who have no other options. For beneficiaries, even a mildly successful campaign can be transformative.

Sure, there are probably more efficient, more equitable ways to handle medical bankruptcies and funeral costs than an endless string of crowdfunds. But until those solutions materialize, giving to one another — however imperfectly — might be the best we’ve got.

X just paywalled Grok’s deepfakes. They’re still everywhere.

2026-01-09T11:58:07-05:00

Since the launch of its new “spicy mode” image generator, xAI’s Grok chatbot has begun spitting out nonconsensual deepfakes. | Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto

What happens when you merge the world’s most toxic social media cesspool with the world’s most unhinged, uninhibited, and intentionally “spicy” AI chatbot?

It looks a lot like what we’re seeing play out on X right now. Users have been feeding images into xAI’s Grok chatbot, which boasts a powerful and largely uncensored image and video generator, to create explicit content, including of ordinary people. The proliferation of deepfake porn on the platform has gotten so extreme that in recent days, xAI’s Grok chatbot has spit out an estimated one nonconsensual sexual image every single minute. Over the past several weeks, thousands of users have hopped on the grotesque trend of using Grok to undress mostly women and children — yes, children — without their consent through a rather obvious workaround.

Inside this story

To be clear, you can’t ask Grok — or most mainstream AIs, for that matter — for nudes. But you can ask Grok to “undress” an image someone posted on X, or if that doesn’t work, ask it to put them in a tiny, invisible bikini. The US has laws against this kind of abuse, and yet the team at xAI has been almost…blasé about it.

Inquiries from several journalists to the company about the matter received automated “Legacy media lies” messages in response. xAI CEO Elon Musk, who just successfully raised $20 billion in funding for the company, was sharing deepfake bikini photos of (content warning) himself until recently. On Friday morning, after widespread condemnation and threats from regulators, X appeared to paywall the ability to generate AI images simply by tagging @grok, though for now at least, the feature is still easily available for free elsewhere on X and in Grok’s standalone app.

While Musk on January 4 warned that users will “suffer consequences” if they use Grok to make “illegal images,” xAI has given no indication that it will remove or address the core features — paywalled for $8 per month or not — allowing users to create such explicit content, though some of the most incriminating posts have been removed. xAI has not responded to Vox’s request for comment as of Friday morning.

No one should be surprised here. It was only a matter of time before the toxic sludge that’s become of the website formerly known as Twitter combined with xAI’s Grok — which has been explicitly marketed for its NSFW capabilities — to create a new form of sexual violence. Musk’s company has essentially created a deepfake porn machine that makes the creation of realistic and offensive images of anyone as simple as writing a reply in X. Worse, those images are feeding into a social network of hundreds of millions of people, which not only spreads them further but can implicitly reward posters with more followers and more attention.

You might be wondering, as I think we all find ourselves doing several times a day now: How is any of this legal? To be clear, it’s not. But advocates and legal experts say that current laws still fall far short of the protections that victims need, and the sheer volume of deepfakes being created on platforms like X make the protections that do exist very difficult to enforce.

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“The prompts that are allowed or not allowed” using a chatbot like Grok “are the result of deliberate and intentional choices by the tech companies who are deploying the models,” said Sandi Johnson, senior legislative policy counsel at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

“In any other context, when somebody turns a blind eye to harm that they are actively contributing to, they’re held responsible,” she said. “Tech companies should not be held to any different standard.”

The rise of deepfakes

First, let’s talk about how we got here.

“Perpetrators using technology for sexual abuse is not anything new,” Johnson said. “They’ve been doing that forever.”

But AI cemented a new kind of sexual violence through the rise of deepfakes.

Deepfake porn of female celebrities — created in their likeness, but without their consent, using more primitive AI tools — has been circulating on the internet for years, long before ChatGPT became a household name.

But more recently, so-called nudify apps and websites have made it extremely easy for users, some of them teenagers, to turn innocuous photos of friends, classmates, and teachers into deepfake explicit content without the subject’s consent.

The situation has become so dire that last year, advocates like Johnson convinced Congress to pass the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes nonconsensual deepfake porn and mandates that companies remove such materials from their platforms within 48 hours of it being flagged or potentially face fines and injunctions. The provision goes into effect this May.

For many victims, even if companies like X do begin to crack down on enforcement by then, it will come too late for victims who shouldn’t have to wait for months — or days — to have such posts taken down.

“For these tech companies, it was always like ‘break things, and fix it later,’” said Johnson. “You have to keep in mind that as soon as a single [deepfake] image is generated, this is irreparable harm.”

X turned deepfakes into a feature

Most social media and major AI platforms have complied as much as possible with emerging state and federal regulations around deepfake porn and in particular, child sexual abuse material.

Not only because such materials are “flagrantly, radioactively illegal,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, “but also because it’s gross and most companies have no desire to have any association of their brand being a one-stop shop for it.”

But Musk’s xAI seems to be the exception.

Since the company debuted its “spicy mode” video generation capabilities on X last year, observers have been raising the alarm about what’s essentially become a “vertically integrated” deepfake porn tool, said Pfefferkorn.

Most “nudify” apps require users to first download a photo, maybe from Instagram or Facebook, and then upload it to whichever platform they’re using. If they want to share the deepfake, then they need to download it from the app and send it through another messaging platform, like Snapchat.

These multiple points of friction gave regulators some crucial openings for intercepting nonconsensual content, with a kind of Swiss cheese-style defense system. Maybe they couldn’t stop everything, but they could get some “nudify” apps banned from app stores. They’ve been able to get Meta to crack down on advertisements hawking the apps to teenagers.

But on X, creating nonconsensual deepfakes using Grok has become almost entirely frictionless, allowing users to source photos, prompt deepfakes, and share them all in one go. Even with the new restrictions put in place for non-premium users on Friday morning, even free users can still make deepfake content almost seamlessly, without ever leaving the app.

“That would matter less if it were a social media community for nuns, but it is a social media community for Nazis,” said Pfefferkorn, referring to X’s far-right pivot in recent years. The result is a nonconsensual deepfake crisis that appears to be ballooning out of control.

In recent days, users have created 84 times more sexualized deepfakes on X per hour than on the other top five deepfake sites combined, according to independent deepfake and social media researcher Genevieve Oh. And those images can get shared far more quickly and widely than anywhere else. “The emotional and reputational injury to the person depicted is now exponentially greater” than it has been for other deepfake sites, said Wayne Unger, an assistant professor of law specializing in emerging technology at Quinnipiac University, “because X has hundreds of millions of users who can all see the image.”

It would be virtually impossible for X to individually moderate every one of those nonconsensual images or videos, even if it wanted to — or even if the company hadn’t fired most of its moderators when Musk took over in 2022.

Is X going to be held accountable for any of this?

If the same kind of criminal imagery appeared in a magazine or an online publication, then the company could be held liable for it, subject to hefty fines and possible criminal charges.

Social media platforms like X don’t face the same consequences because Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects internet platforms from liability for much of what users do or say on their platforms — albeit with some notable exceptions, including child pornography. The clause has been a pillar for free speech on the internet — a world where platforms were held liable for everything on them would be far more constrained — but Johnson says the clause has also become a “financial shield” for companies unwilling to moderate their platforms.

With the rise of AI, however, that shield might finally be starting to crack, said Unger. He believes that companies like xAI should not be covered by Section 230 because they are no longer mere hosts to hateful or illegal content, but, through their own chatbots, essentially creators of it.

“X has made a design decision to allow Grok to generate sexually explicit imagery of adults and children,” he said. “The user may have prompted Grok to generate it,” but the company “made a decision to release a product that can produce it in the first place.”

Unger does not expect that xAI — or industry groups like NetChoice — are going to back down without a legal fight against any attempts to further legislate content moderation or regulate easy-to-abuse tools like Grok. “Maybe they’ll concede the minor part of it,” since laws governing [child pornography] are so strong, he said, but “at the very least they’re gonna argue that Grok should be able to do it for adults.”

In any case, the public outrage in response to the deepfake porn Grokpocalypse may finally force a reckoning around an issue that’s long been in the shadows. Around the world, countries like India, France, and Malaysia have begun probes into the sexualized imagery flooding X. Eventually, Musk did post on X that those generating illegal content will face consequences, but this goes deeper than just the users themselves.

“This isn’t a computer doing this,” Johnson said. “These are deliberate decisions that are being made by people running these companies, and they need to be held accountable.”

Update, January 9, 12 pm ET: This piece, originally published January 9, has been updated to reflect the news of xAI paywalling Grok’s deepfake capabilities.